Re: Magic MIME

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Juri Linkov <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2008 01:18:41 +0200
> 
> Are there any obstacles to using magic-mime to determine the file
> type in Emacs?  If linking libmagic is not possible, then maybe
> we could parse the magic.mime file, and even run the `file'
> command directly on a visited file?

Whatever the decision is, please avoid relying in external commands
that are not available on all supported platforms.  `file' isn't.

Emacs should be powerful enough to be able to visit files without
requiring an external tool; if it needs to consult some database for
that, it should be easy enough to include such a data base in the
Emacs distribution, perhaps even in a form that is convenient for
reading in Lisp.